Sarah Drinkwater – Campus London

Pod Of The Day episode 21 – Sarah Drinkwater Campus London on Silicon Real

There is so much cool stuff happening all over the world in this age of disruption. One of them is Google for Entrepreneurs house in London: Campus London. Its sounds like such an awesome place. And immediately when I heard this episode, I wanted to go visit it. And so I will soon. Will you come with me?

Together with places like The Trampery and Second Home popping up all over London. It sounds like places I really want go visit to take my concept of a Creative Social Dojo further.

So enter Sarah Drinkwater head of Campus London into the Silicon Real studio with Brian Rose. It’s a goto place if you go to London to meet creative people, just like SUP46 is the goto place when coming to Stockholm.

Sarah has so much great things to say about what is happening in London and all over the world now with new exiting creative hubs blooming up. There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur and start a startup. If you have nothing happening in your town you have 2 great options. Travel into the world and start a new cool place in your town.

Accelerate To The Future

Here are some of my takeaways from a really interesting conversation.

Go meet your customers
What ever you do in the world you are gonna need devoted customers. So go find out what they talk about and care about. Get into the head of you customers. Ask yourself if you care about the same thing. Do you? If your passions align you are on the right track.

Creative Hubs

There are a lot of different creative hubs blooming up all over the world now.

Every city is differentStockholm – London – Berlin – Tel Aviv – Seoul – New York
Focus on what each city does best. Don’t try to make another city a blend copy. Embrace what everyone offers in diversity.

Campus London itself is very diverse. When comes age, ethnicity and gender. Not like Silicon Valley. This is great when putting together a startup team.

Hire both men and women.
Get diverse teams with different backgrounds.
Hire people who are both Right & Left-handed for example.

A great example is Apple Watch. The team that made it was all male. It has all kinds of health functions. But they forgot to put in a function that keep track of period cycles.

A diverse CV is good
Startups needs good generalists who can tackle a lot of divers problems. Being a Holistic like isn’t so bad then and in dire need in the world.

We look for CV’s where people have taken risks.
People who can talk about their journey.
We can learn a lot about a person when they talk about themselves.

Chemistry is very important when hiring or building a team
Spend time with people you are going to include in your team. Have bear with them. Find out their passions and what makes them tick. You are going to spend a lot of time with them.

Enter childrenOne thing that many places don’t take into account is that is the life pulse of you entrepreneurs that have or want to have children. That was something that Campus Tel Aviv embraced.
They started Moms and Dads at Campus and Baby friendly startup school.

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They host events like:

Startup Funeral – Founder Failure Stories

Failure is something to learn from. So this is an excellent idea. Usually people like taking about their successes and we as humans like to celebrate winners. This and that media are constantly portraying things like overnight successes is really troublesome. There is nothing like an overnight success. It’s just a myth that we like to believe in. And modern storytelling isn’t helping in some respects. We like to believe in that fairytale story. The reality is always the other way around. Success takes hard work. And it takes connections and teamwork. Both something that Creative Hubs like London are fostering.

So telling people about allt the “experiments” (That we really should call or failures) we have done and what we learn on the way is an excellent way to boost a community. By learning by others experiences we all grow faster.

People – Culture – Community

There has never been a better time to start a startup. There are som many great places all over the world that enables modern thinking. It is all about connecting with People. Embracing the new startup Culture. And building Communities.

Get Envoled And Start Building Things

Embrace who you are. Don’t ever hide behind something you are not – Sara Drinkwater

To start a cluster with startups yourself in your home town if there isn’t one already.All it takes is enthusiasm and willing.

#gbgTechWeek

Here on the west coast of Sweden where I live things are starting to get in motion. Coming up in May between 7th and 18th there a whole range of events in Gothenburg to lift it as a creative startup hub. It’s called #gbgTechWeek. I myself will try to attend as many events as I can.

Maybe I see you there. Come up and talk to me. I will be launching myself as great helper of startups with my new Creative Ninja Agency.